Cultural Anthropology

The extraordinary developments of the last five years have led us to rethink the organization of the book and many of the examples and analyses that we use. There are many hundred small changes and more than 300 new references. Every chapter has been revised and all statistics, graphs, and charts updated. However, readers will also notice several large changes. The biggest of these is the introduction of a new chapter on race and ethnicity. This chapter adds a great deal of new material and analysis to the information found in the stratification chapter in earlier editions.

A second critical change is that in previous editions, all ethnographies appeared as boxed features titled “Ethnography.” In the new edition, some ethnographies have been moved into the main flow of the text (particularly in Chapter 5, Making a Living) others now appear as Reading Assignments. This allows instructors who use Sage Vantage to track students’ responses to questions about this material.

One of the critical ways in which we have responded to changes in world culture and in anthropology is through the features in each chapter. Some that are new to this edition include gestures and emoticons in Chapter 4, Culinary thrill seekers (about humans and flavor), and climate change and food choice, both in Chapter 5, the gig economy in chapter 8, Inequality, Race, and COVID in Chapter 9, working with female heroin addicts in chapter 11, and Designing a Picture Book for Indigenous Kids in Chapter 14.

Issues around medical care and public health play in increasingly important role in anthropology and are an area of student interest. Although we do not have a chapter on medical anthropology, we incorporate it in many places throughout the book. You’ll find it particularly in our discussion of Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down in Chapter 3, Pandemics and Emergencies in Chapter 3, Anthropology and Nutrition in Chapter 5, Race, Health and the Environment, and COVID 19 in Chapter 9, Elder Care in Chapter 10, Working with Heroin Addicts in Chapter 11, Vaccine Refusal in Chapter 12, Health, Colonialism and History in Chapter 14, and in several places in our final chapter.